570
PARTISAN REVIEW
of the reunification of Germany. First of all, I want to thank Edith for
offering me an opportunity to think about what I am working on now,
cultural representations. Basically, I am working on the United States
and France, although I am pleased to also have the opportunity today
to think of the relationship between France and Germany. This brings
me back to the beginning of the 1970s, when I was a professor in Berlin
and first noticed how little the French knew about Germany. France
and Germany belonged to two totally different cultural worlds, and I
was amazed, for example, to have to read Rosa Luxemburg, Ernst
Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and many of the Frankfurt School writers in
German, as their works were not yet translated into French.
The French perception of the reunification of Germany also is based
on this lack of real knowledge. France and Germany have contrasting
histories. France has always had a very strong central administration, and
in France there have been continuous dynasties, whereas in Germany
there were lots of ruptures. Since the Middle Ages, the liberation of the
German state came about through the process of
Sonderweg,
a process
not shared by other Occidental countries . The dismantling of central
power in Germany took place at the same time that French central
power increased.
In
fact,
Fran~ois
the Second declared the German state
dead, and Napolean did so as well.
German reunificiation and German power were at the center of the
French debates after November 1989.
It
was a major question for French
intellectuals. French representations of Germany consist of a vision of
two Germanies, which are not East Germany and West Germany but old
Germany and young Germany. The old Germany, the one that the
French seem to favor, is an old respectable country, with an old tradi–
tion and an old culture of cosmopolitanism. The other Germany they
refer to is a young nation moved by the irrepressibility of power and
blood. And as General de Gaulle wrote in
France and Its Military Power,
in 1938, Germany remains Germany.
In
a country motivated by so many
repressed passions, moderation never lasts.
To the French, Germany has been a country marked forever, a
country that could never recuperate from its stigmatization. Therefore,
the reunification of Germany was to be totally avoided.
It
was frighten–
ing, terrorizing, according to the head of the French Communist Party,
George Marchais.
In
February 1990, he stated that a large Germany
would mean the defeat of France; it would be the second military
power after the Soviet Union.
It
put the future of France into question.
We needed a big debate. The French people had to give their opinion
about what this would mean for our country. We hoped also that the
